It simply does not matter what you think about LGBTQ+. The fact is that the people who are socially center-right on this have a vote, and Firefox's marketshare collapsed when they fired Eich for supporting Prop 8. I remember seeing the outrage all across that part of the Internet.

It was so bad that if Mitchell Baker and her allies who wanted Eich gone were actively conspiring for personal profit or ideological reasons with Google to shift users over to Chrome they would have been hard-pressed to find a lawful means to achieve that end more efficiently.

It's a stark reminder that people who are not builders by trade and profession should almost never be near the levers of power over a FOSS project.

YT should do two things here, and this would probably save them a lot of grief:

1. Do a 3 strikes, you're out on false flagging content within the same year.

2. Adopt a policy that users caught organizing a brigading attack on content providers will be doxxed to the content creator at Google's discretion.

Use women and/or children as an excuse

I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt here...

Roblox and Nintendo have very similar markets. The former has had very public examples of sex offenders crawling all over its platform targeting minors. It's not a "feudalistic tactic" for Nintendo here. It's literally their legal department looking at a quasi-competitor and going "awww helll nah" and sending some requirements to the engineers to make it easy for parents to signal Uncle Sam's party van through Nintendo systems.

Nintendo is extremely clear that the purpose of its recording and review system is "to protect GameChat users, especially minors

A significant portion of their user base are minors and parents of minors. This isn't Microsoft pulling this on an audience that is mainly 18+. Nintendo is stopping just short of dunking on Roblox here. It's a "very Japanese" warning: predators, go somewhere else because we are prepared to aggressively help parents report you to law enforcement.

Microsoft also recently announced that they are slowing some and suspending other AI investments. My rough guess is that Microsoft over-invested in AI and hiring during the 2020-2023 surge and is now in an "ohhhhh fuqqqqqq" mode looking at the ROI of those moves imploding hard in the face of AI not working out as well as they hoped.

They're also supposedly sitting on a ton, an absolute glut, of Nvidia hardware they bought when they were carpet-bombing Nvidia with cash to outbid many of their rivals during the AI hypewave ~ 2-3 years ago. So make of all of that what you will.

In 2025, the average student is being told to take on a ton of debt to do this. Debt levels that we would have considered completely stupid and horrifying for an 18-22 year old. Levels that, 25 years ago, could have literally bought you most of a small house in much of the country.

Look at the job market, look at those numbers, and tell those young men they're stupid for preferring $15/hr with no debt to $25/hr with a lower interest rate credit card bill that large hanging over their heads for a degree that is of questionable value.

there will be a lot of money to be made fixing the disaster by hand.

For companies, not for individuals. The government will very likely never approve a labor rate that comes out to a well above market salary unless the SSA is blessed with contract officers who genuinely understand the difference between some garbage contractor from InfoSys or IBM consulting and a real COBOL SME.

As an individual, you would be better off not adding the black hole of "I did COBOL legacy development" to your resume and let the system burn. What you make from it will likely not come close to the career hit unless you have some really good modernization angle like "I was one of 3 people, heavily used AI **correctly** and got it working again."

This post does a great job of explaining how TOR can function without hidden services and the societal cost that allowing TOR to provide "hidden services" functionality has cost to human civilization.

TL;DR there is no need to compromise the E2E encryption of TOR to remove the bad stuff. What's needed is for TOR to remove the hidden services functionality because there is no moral or legal defense of a system whose main use case is to allow the publication of content that is not legal under even 1A case law.

You know, everyone focuses on Terminator as the great example of how AI goes rogue in pop culture, but I'm thinking it's going to resemble Halo instead. Here's why.

It's only a matter of time before AI agents get added to replace sys admins. Then it's only a matter of time before some numbnut decides to roll a LLM-powered system to manage the agents.

At that point, you don't have Skynet from Terminator, you have Mendicant Bias from Halo. Then criminals, 4Chan and/or state actors hit the LLM-powered management system and convince it to command the AI agents to cause an absolute meltdown on the nodes they control. Lock out the company/government, fry data, run a supplied trojan to ship data, etc.

From what I understand, WordPress.org is offering a service and that service is taking a massive thrashing from WP Engine to the point where WordPress (rightly or wrongly) considers it to be abusive.

That is NOT what is happening. Matt Mullenweg runs both Automattic and WordPress.org. Matt has been on a tear in the last few months complaining that WP Engine doesn't "pay their fair share." WordPress is set up to use WordPress.org as its directory for plugins, security updates, etc. When WP Engine refused to pay up what he felt was their "fair share," he cut off access to WordPress.org.

The fix for this is actual fucking online privacy legislation.

That's why I said we actually want the police to use this stuff like crazy because it actually builds the case for tougher privacy laws. In fact, we want the police brazenly using this data so that it's as black and white as possible, otherwise people will never see a need for deep reform.

I think the only way the public is going to give a damn about privacy as a real political issue is if the legal standard is "yeah, you have literally no 4th amendment protection from active location surveillance if you agree to the ToS."

Anyone who has used Flask, Django, Spring Boot, Rails, etc. doesn't even have to think about why they'd prefer to debug code an AI wrote against a framework vs implementing functionality with raw standard lib functionality.

Every good Java developer has seen the work of devs who decided to raw dog it with servlets to respond to REST instead of using Spring Boot, Micronaut, Quarkus, etc. That sounds precisely what this is generating, if not worse, and that's a resounding HELLLLLL NO.

Mullenweg's handling of the governance has been an absolute shit show AFAICT for the FOSS side, and it seems like a lot of FOSS decisions were set up to subtly financially advantage one vendor.

Generally speaking, mature FOSS projects with the ASF, CNCF, GNU, etc. have governance models that actively avoid this "BDFL wearing two hats for great profit" scenario, among other obvious conflicts of interest.

Sorry, guys. Y'all chose the GPL v2 and WP Engine is compliant.

Here's a graphic on their track record. They're not a "short and distort" fund. They tend to be pretty solid at finding companies engaged in shenanigans.

I would hazard a guess that the CSAM/predator angle was deeply researched because Roblox could utterly bankrupt them under even US defamation laws since unbacked accusations of sexual misconduct firmly fall outside 1A protections.